'TERF' is the new 'unfuckable'. Credit: Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images

Margaret Atwood never fancied herself a discourse power broker, but we thrust the role on her anyway. The year was 2016; the election of Donald Trump had sparked a brief, blazing feminist backlash that now feels like something out of a fever dream. Self-described ânasty womenâ in pink knitted hats snarled in furious unison at the neanderthals who put someone like that in office. âPussy grabs backâ became a religion, Margaret Atwood its patron saint: the scribe whose dystopian tale of women subjugated, domesticated and downtrodden now seemed poised to become a reality.
The Handmaidâs Tale describes a futuristic puritan patriarchy in which women have been stripped of their liberties and forced into service as child-bearers for the ruling class. A television adaptation was already in development when Trump was elected, but its arrival in the spring of 2017 felt tailor-made for the moment â and its imagery, especially those blood-red robes with their creepy, face-obscuring bonnets, was too instagrammable to resist. In June that year, the New York Times noted that Handmaid costumes had become de rigueur at protests against everything from Planned Parenthood funding cuts in Washington, D.C. to abortion restrictions in Ohio.
Meanwhile, Atwood was newly hailed as a modern-day Cassandra, one whose warnings we could no longer afford to ignore. As one Guardian columnist wrote, âThe world of Offred, though still notionally a fiction, has migrated from creative construct to the realm of the thinkable.â
Atwood, it should be said, never quite bought into the vision of herself as the oracle of the Trump resistance. When pressed, her responses were invariably judicious â âWeâre not living in Gilead yet, but there are Gilead-like symptoms going onâ, she told one interviewer â though media coverage framed them as anything but. The most striking example of this is her New York Times retrospective on The Handmaidâs Tale, written in March 2017: the headline reads, âMargaret Atwood on What The Handmaidâs Tale Means in the Age of Trumpâ. The essay doesnât mention him.
And there were hints, always, that Atwood wasnât quite as gung-ho for the new feminism as some pretended. In 2016, she was a signatory on a letter demanding accountability in the case of Stephen Galloway, a professor who was accused of sexual assault and fired without due process by the University of British Columbia. (A defamation suit by Galloway is ongoing in the Canadian courts.) Atwoodâs 2018 essay about the matter became Twitterâs outrage du jour and caused the website Vox to downgrade Atwoodâs status from âfeminist iconâ to âproblematic faveâ. Atwoodâs response was a bone-dry tweet:
Taking a break from being Supreme Being Goddess, omniscient, omnipotent, and responsible for all ills. Sorry I have failed the world so far on gender equality. Maybe stop trying? Will be back later. (Next incarnation maybe.)
â Margaret E Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) January 14, 2018
Yet any qualms about Atwoodâs ideological purity were eclipsed at the time by her usefulness to the movement. Simply put, people wanted to wear Handmaidâs Tale outfits in front of the Supreme Court more than they wanted to purge the author for being a little too agnostic on #MeToo.
But fast-forward to our present day: The Handmaidâs Tale has long since finished its four-season run on Hulu. The #MeToo movement is yesterdayâs news. And that fervour for protecting womenâs bodies â from government overreach and groping hands alike â has been increasingly replaced by a base-level discomfort with womenâs bodies, not just as a discussion topic, but as a concept. By the time Atwood came under fire again, this time for retweeting an article observing the bizarre retreat of the word âwomanâ from the public sphere, the cultural tides had turned. The enemy in the Oval Office was gone; the feminist eye of Sauron turned inward.
And for the same movement that once hailed Atwood as a prophet because she wrote so searingly about how womenâs bodies and biology become the subject of oppression, now she was vaguely suspicious â for the exact same reason.
Atwood, as usual, is not interested in what you think of her â nor in placing herself into an ideological box that would make her easy to dismiss. Her new book of essays, Burning Questions, is ironically titled: the new feminism is desperate to know Atwoodâs stance on gender ideology, but in interviews, Atwood has artfully refused to be pinned down. Those looking for an answer wonât find it here.
Still, itâs hard to imagine that sheâs surprised by the turn the feminist movement has taken towards purging those women, and particularly women of a certain age, who wonât toe the line on its uptake of the latest in gender ideology. Insofar as Atwood can predict the future, itâs always been because she pays attention to the past. âI believed two things. (1) That if true believers say theyâll do a thing, when they get the chance theyâll do it. (2) Whoever says âIt canât happen hereâ is wrong. Anything can happen anywhere, given the right conditions, as history has demonstrated time and time again,â she writes, in the essay titled âReflections on The Handmaidâs Taleâ.
And the social disposability of women who are past childbearing age and hence no longer serve any social purpose (the unspoken subtext: to men) is one of those time-and-time-again themes. From the 19th century medical consensus that menopausal women might as well die off, having outlived their usefulness, to the dearth of roles for women over 40 in Hollywood, to the shared (and oft-written-about) feeling among middle-aged women that theyâve somehow become invisible. And while feminism has long pushed back against the patriarchy that pushes older women into obscurity, it turns out weâre not above engaging in our own little litmus tests for the grande dames who wonât get with the times.
Yesterdayâs feminist heroes â the Atwoods, the Rowlings, the second-wavers writ large â are today subject to interrogation about where their loyalties lie. If they donât pass the test, into the bin they go. The new feminist wields the word âterfâ to the same end as the menâs rights activists who deem us âunfuckableâ, hence useless: itâs a label designed to deem its wearer irrelevant, out of bounds, voiceless.
Seen from certain angles, thereâs something peculiarly optimistic about all this, as if feminism has so thoroughly won the battle for womenâs bodily autonomy that it need not be our primary concern. In fact, all this discussion of women and bodies is actually offensive and unnecessary and should no longer take place (or if it must, we should at least have the decency to leave the W-word out of it and say âpeople with cervixesâ instead). There are echoes of the past here, too: in her notoriously negative review of The Handmaidâs Tale for the New York Times in 1986, Mary McCarthy declared the novel too dystopian to be believed, an alternate history of a culture war that had already been thoroughly won. âEven when I try, in the light of these palely lurid pages, to take the Moral Majority seriously, no shiver of recognition ensuesâ, she wrote.
Todayâs insistence that feminism should pivot away from womenâs bodies and toward inclusivity and diversity suggests that The Handmaidâs Tale has been deemed an irrelevant and impossible fiction once again â even as Roe v. Wade, the landmark US Supreme Court case that legalised abortion, is facing its most serious threat in decades. One gets the sense of an army wandering off its longtime battlefield in search of a new conflict, a giant MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner floating down to cover the few red-robed protesters still lingering at the front.
Is Margaret Atwood a coward?
Maybe that pivot is the right choice, or maybe not; as Atwood notes, âThere is no such thing as being on the wrong side of history â if history means whoâs in political power and whoâs not, and whoâs in intellectual fashion and whoâs not, because history of that kind doesnât have sides.â
But while weâll have to wait for the benefit of hindsight before those purged from the movement emerge in the rear-view as either traitors or martyrs, we can consider one thing now: who benefits from this moment of intra-feminist conflict? Who is watching, hungrily, as we tear each other apart?
This is the kind of question Atwood doesnât ordinarily shy away from answering, unconcerned as she is with which ideas are currently in vogue. Not only that, itâs one she has answered, in the essay titled, âAm I a Bad Feminist?â Written for The Globe and Mail in 2018 after she ran afoul of the #MeToo orthodoxy, it is reproduced in Burning Questions â but with a curious omission: one that seems to illuminate the limits of Atwoodâs bravery when it comes to the changing landscape of feminism and the issues that put us at each otherâs throats. Four years ago, when the dissident feministâs topic was the excesses of #MeToo, the last paragraph of this essay included a barn-burner of a line:
âA war among women, as opposed to a war on women, is always pleasing to those who do not wish women well.â
But that was then, and this is now â in a world where the feminist movement is tearing itself apart not over sexual mores, but gender ideology. And in the version of this essay that appears in Atwoodâs new book, that final warning has been left out.
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